Aleksey the Great

Four and a half years ago, Jordan Bass, a freshman at Yale, met a tall blond Uzbek immigrant named Aleksey Garber—a prospective student who, in this era of increased specialization, stood out for his almost cartoonish well-roundedness: a twenty-first-century Renaissance man. Last week, Garber achieved notoriety when a job application that he’d submitted to investment banks was forwarded, with sarcastic glee (“Certainly one way to get your foot in the door . . .”), around the young-professionals circuit, but back in 2002 he was still a student at Manhattan’s Dwight School. He told Bass that he’d taught tennis to Jerry Seinfeld and Harrison Ford. He was a specialist in “Chinese orthopedic massage,” and had the business card to prove it. The Dalai Lama had apparently written his college recommendation.

The occasion for the Bass-Garber meeting was Bulldog Days, an annual event where high-school seniors who have been admitted to Yale descend on New Haven for a sample of collegiate life: beer-drinking, pizza, relentless a capella. Garber preferred to remain in the dorm and tell Yalies all about himself. “He talked for, like, six hours straight the first night,” Bass, who is now an editor at McSweeney’s, recalled the other day. “He had a lot of affiliations with élite institutions. He was an action star, an espionage expert, and a professional athlete. He would be on the C.I.A. firing range one day and, the next, at a martial-arts competition that took place in this secret system of tunnels underneath Woodstock, New York. Then he was at a skiing competition in Switzerland. He told us the Russian Mafia had him forging passports.”

One of Bass’s roommates began surreptitiously transcribing Garber’s James Bond-like stories. “He became kind of a circus attraction,” Bass said. “By the end of the weekend, we were bringing people over just to sit by him and listen.” Bass tried calling the number on Garber’s card, and reached an older-sounding woman. “It seemed like it might have been his mom, or something,” he said. Bass wrote an article for the campus tabloid, Rumpus, entitled “CRAAAZY PREFROSH LIES, IS JUST WEIRD.”

Garber decided to attend Yale anyway. (Upon arriving, he sent Bass an e-mail complaining that the Rumpus story belittled his Buddhism.) Since then, he has changed his last name to Vayner, and, at least by his own account, started modelling (he charges two hundred dollars an hour), written a book (“Women’s Silent Tears: A Unique Gendered Perspective on the Holocaust”), founded a charity for troubled kids, served as an adviser at an investment firm called Vayner Capital Management, taken up ballroom dancing (the international rumba is his specialty), won two games in a tennis match against Pete Sampras, retired from professional martial arts, and mastered the art of “bone-setting.” He is now a senior. He chose to include much of this information in his résumé, which referred potential employers to a short video depicting him at the gym (evidently, he bench-presses nearly five hundred pounds), serving a tennis ball (a hundred and forty miles an hour, or so it appears), skiing, ballroom-dancing, and splitting a stack of bricks with his bare hand.

On its face, Vayner’s C.V. may be the world’s greatest, which raises the question of why he’s looking for an entry-level finance position—the fallback for so many unremarkable Ivy Leaguers who lack dual backgrounds in espionage and Eastern medicine. When the e-mails started circulating, one blog, IvyGate, said it had uncovered a number of dubious coincidences: “Women’s Silent Tears” contains material that was lifted from an online Holocaust encyclopedia; Vayner’s charity (Youth Empowerment Strategies) shares its name with a New Jersey consultancy; and his investment firm borrows much of its mission statement from a company in Denver. (Vayner sent a cease-and-desist letter to IvyGate.) Meanwhile, Vayner’s legend grows, like that of a latter-day Paul Bunyan. Acquaintances report hearing that he is one of four people licensed to handle nuclear waste in the state of Connecticut, that he must register his hands as lethal weapons at airports, and even that he has killed two dozen men in Tibetan gladiatorial contests.

Never mind what’s apocryphal and what’s real in all this. Will the résumé get results? The advertising executive Donny Deutsch said on MSNBC that he was impressed. (“I would hire this guy sight unseen.”) Yale alumni seem a little less so. On the listserv for the Class of 1970, for instance, a message with the subject “Sad and bizarre Yale story” linked to a blog where a man had attempted to diagnose Vayner’s condition. “On the basis of the DSM IV, my point of view is that he is possibly a victim of histrionic personality disorder,” the post read.

An alumnus replied to the message, suggesting mere borderline personality disorder, and adding, “It goes back almost to Freud, and it fits this guy like a counterfeit Armani suit.”

Jordan Bass’s father, as it happens, was in the Class of 1970. “It was my son who wrote the Rumpus piece,” he wrote to everyone. “I recall, at the time, thinking that a guy with this level of grandiose and delusional thinking would either be homeless or president in twenty-five years.”

Yale has declined to comment on the situation. (“That’s unfortunate,” a spokeswoman said, when she was told that this magazine was running a story about Vayner.) Vayner did not return messages, but in his video, between athletic stunts, one can see him dressed in a business suit, giving an interview. “Success is a mental phenomenon, not a physical one,” he says. “To achieve success, you must first conceive it, and believe in it.”

Ben McGrath began working at The New Yorker in 1999, and has been a staff writer since 2003.